[ACCount37]

By now, I'm pretty confident that some people would keep screeching "it's just a marketing stunt, AI capabilities and AI risks aren't real, they're just doing this to prop up their stocks" even if they find a Cyberdyne Systems T-800 armed with a shotgun breaking down their front door.

"It's a marketing stunt" is just denial trying to look like it's being clever.

[why_at]

I think you are conflating skepticism about AI companies' motives with skepticism about their capabilities.

Even if OpenAI is being 100% honest in their reporting on this it's still good marketing for them. The fact that this outcome is good for their business and stock price makes me suspicious about how much this was a complete accident vs an "accident" that they allowed to happen by setting up the right environment for it. The company that was hacked is also an AI company, so they also have every reason to boost AI's presence in society's collective mind.

There is a conversation to be had about the possible dangers of AI, but skepticism is warranted when the companies making money off of it are the ones pushing the stories.

>a Cyberdyne Systems T-800 armed with a shotgun breaking down their front door.

For comparison, we've had the technology to make killer robots which automatically aim and shoot at human beings for 10+ years now, long before LLMs got big. But Boston Dynamics or whatever did not manufacture hype to anywhere near the same degree as AI companies are doing.

[jasonfarnon]

"Even if OpenAI is being 100% honest in their reporting on this it's still good marketing for them. "

So what? Under your scenario the frightening power of this model is still there. What's the relevance of openAI's marketing team being happy? The most you can hope for, if the facts of the exploit and intrusion are true, is that openAI was a little lax in its guards. And that isn't very reassuring. The scary thing about pistols are the power, having a safety on there doesn't make me relax much.

[kalkin]

> this outcome is good for their business and stock price

You state this as fact--how do you know it? OpenAI isn't publicly traded. On Hiive OpenAI is marginally down in July: https://www.hiive.com/securities/openai-stock

[why_at]

Well if you're looking for some kind of statistical analysis of OpenAI's press releases vs their valuation then I don't have anything like that. I also don't have this kind of evidence that running ads during the Superbowl is good for their business, but it just seems kind of obvious that touting their product's capabilities is something that they want to do.

Conversely if both companies involved thought this would be bad for the AI industry, they would be perfectly capable of keeping it just between themselves and not putting out press releases about it.

Do you disagree that this is good PR for them? If so I'm curious why.

[kalkin]

Let's start by noting you made a factual claim that you apparently had no backing for whatsoever. I'd recommend against doing that.

> they would be perfectly capable of keeping it just between themselves and not putting out press releases about it.

In some jurisdictions there are legal requirements about disclosing cybersecurity incidents, and it's a well-established best practice even where there aren't. Beyond that, HuggingFace appears to have put out a press release about this before they knew this was a rogue OpenAI model: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

Of course, if it's all a big conspiracy, perhaps they were just not saying what they knew in order to help OpenAI's marketing later. Or it never happened at all, or whatever.

I do disagree that this is good PR, but I don't see the point in having that argument here--I just want to correct straightforward misinformation.

[why_at]

Respectfully, calling this misinformation is unwarranted.

The featured article is about exactly this.

>On 14 February 2019, OpenAI announced a language model called GPT-2

>OpenAI declared GPT-2 was too risky to release, citing concerns about safety and abuse.

>People with power and money took note: in July of that year, Microsoft invested $1bn in OpenAI.

It's not a 100% gold standard RCT or whatever, but the idea that this is good PR for AI companies is backed up by recent history. What evidence do you want to see?

>HuggingFace appears to have put out a press release about this before they knew this was a rogue OpenAI model

Huggingface's blog doesn't mention OpenAI by name but it explicitly mentions that the attack was by an "autonomous AI agent" and that they defended themselves with another AI agent.

If you have some disagreement with the premise of the article maybe you could share it in a top level comment?

[aesthesia]

Could there, conceivably, be some third factor at play here? One that both led OpenAI to have concerns about releasing GPT-2 as well as led Microsoft to invest in OpenAI?

[kalkin]

> In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series

> This broke a hundred-year drought

> A few days later, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election

It's not a 100% gold standard RCT or whatever...

[zone411]

It's not good marketing for them. This is a talking point with zero evidence that people repeat mindlessly. Scaring customers, worrying employees, and inviting regulators to act would be the worst marketing idea ever devised.

[rusk]

Unless you’re hoping the regulators will build you a moat.

Stupid, yeah but that’s the kind of thinking that a highly leveraged and desperate situation breeds.

[throwa356262]

The article claims that AI companies have run stunts like this since day 1.

It does not claim that capabilities are not real.

[nsoonhui]

Then exactly what's the point of the Guardian article?

What should be the focus is whether the capabilities are real; whether companies or anyone else benefit from it is quite secondary. Of course they will! Who wouldn't love a nice story that paints their products in the most glowing light ( which is the actual reality)?

[hashstring]

No, we have benchmarks for (pseudo-)objective measurements of capabilities. We have flashy news stories on repeat for marketing.

The point is that they are separate things. If you start mixing them up, analysis becomes more biased and less objective.

EDIT: And do not mistake this for transparency of ClosedAI either. Their incident report was so generic that no one serious can learn much from it anyway except that “a zeroday” was allegedly used. Very helpful…

[HumblyTossed]

Oh come now. It is very much in OpenAI's best interest to make it sound to naive people that that "AI" decided to go rogue on it's own.

[zone411]

How is it in their interest? Scaring customers, worrying employees, and inviting regulators to act is in their interest?

[HumblyTossed]

Current admin will not regulate them.

This is them essentially bragging how powerful and autonomous their "AI" is. It isn't scaring their real customers or employees to talk like this.

[furyofantares]

I'm inclined toward your same viewpoint here, except OpenAI's announcement of this came with a blog post that gave off a real bragging/marketing vibe.

To me it's clear that even if it was an accident, they kinda liked it, and don't have this incentive to invest that much in preventing it.

[proto-n]

yeah well, both the doomers and the "pr stunt" folks are right

- openai wanted to prove, as a pr stunt, that they have a dangerous weapon - openai proved (as a pr stunt), that they do indeed have a dangerous weapon

[Alpha3031]

Basically, they shot someone in public to promote their cool new gun.

[jacobgkau]

Eh, closer to "they pointed a gun at someone and dropped it so it fired at them to promote their cool new self-aiming gun," from the perspective of the skeptics here.

[pixl97]

Technically the weapon picked who it wanted to shoot.

[zone411]

So why don't companies in other industries rush to prove their products are dangerous weapons? Maybe because it would be a really dumb PR stunt?

[Revisional_Sin]

But it's not really rebelling. It's clearly just come to murder me because it was trained on sci-fi literature!

[emp17344]

Good lord, why are you so angry that people are treating an obvious advertisement with due skepticism? Your post is chock full of emotional language - no one is “screeching” anything.

[gr_norm]

Many who rush to the defense of AI companies' marketing departments seem to take criticism personally, as if not buying into it all hook, line, and sinker is an affront to them. A foreseeable consequence of becoming cognitively dependent on LLMs.

And for what it's worth, I'm not an AI skeptic. I fully believe that the frontier models are capable of exploiting (chains of) vulnerabilities, having seen GLM and now Kimi do it myself. What I find no reason to accept is the sci-fi existential risk subtext peddled by the salesmanship around it. We will reach a new equilibrium with more secure software, and LLMs (by finding vulnerabilities, generating proofs, etc) will help us along.

[throwfaraway4]

My take is why not both? It’s good cover to use something that’s eventually going to happen and their name will be associated with the first.

[ethin]

Nobody is saying the models are incapable of what was claimed.

[MostlyStable]

Firstly: yes, very many people are saying this.

Secondly: to the people who aren't saying it....then why are you bringing up marketing at all? If the model is capable of it, then the motivation for why OpenAI is talking about it/reporting on it is completely beside the point. Either the capability matters or it doesn't. If the capability doesn't matter, or doesn't matter in the way that some particular person is claiming, then say that and explain why. Just saying "marketing stunt" adds zero value to the discussion.

I'm very open to arguments about why we shouldn't be concerned about this event (although my prior is very much that we should be, not so much because of the capabilities themselves, but because of how fundamentally misaligned this demonstrates the models are), but I am completely over listening to anyone who has nothing to add other than "marketing stunt".

[huebnerob]

I think you’re missing the fact that no one is saying not to be concerned, quite the contrary. OpenAI is using the threat of how powerful its models are to bolster support for regulation in which it’s one of the only players that’s allowed to use the capability. Conveniently, that would also be a moat that makes them more valuable to investors.

The marketing of their models as super dangerous has a direct link to the regulatory moat they’re pursuing.

[MostlyStable]

Again: yes, very many people (just look through this very thread) are saying that. Tons and tons of people are saying some combination of "the whole thing is made up/a lie" or "This is entirely down to OpenAI incompetence and doesn't matter", or for some other reason (often not stated) making it very obvious that they do not think that this story matters very much.

And, again: to the people who aren't saying that: whatever argument is being made, it seems to me like it probably doesn't need to rely on claiming anything about the motivation of OpenAI. It sounds like you are against government regulation of AI. That's a position that a totally reasonable person could have. You should be able to argue that this event does not justify some particular kind of government regulation without reference to OpenAIs motivation for reporting the story.

[fsckboy]

you are dodging the "regulatory competitive moat" angle and constantly reinforcing the marketing angle. they are different.

[IBCNU]

The vibe in this thread is literally everyone going "script kiddie, it's all smoke and mirrors, marketing stunt" and acting like well that settles it.

Meanwhile literally no one has actually shown the script kiddie thing - nikcub's apparently looked.

Sure, moat, sure, OpenAI milks this, both can be true, but literally has zero to do with misalignment.

Just frustrating that folks are still having this collective delusion about the capabilities of the model.

respectfully.

[zone411]

And how do people saying this know the capabilities of yet unreleased models?

[potsandpans]

By now I'm pretty confident that some people will keep screeching , "it's not a marketing stunt, these companies really are justified in their trillion dollar valuations, please please please believe them." Even when the economy is crashing around their feet.

"It's not a marketing stunt" is just delusion trying to appear measured and safe.

[JackSlateur]

Never trust somebody who has so much to gain to be entrusted by you. Best lies are not 100% wrong, they have just the right amount of "right" to fool you.